[Phil Swift Voice] "THAT'S A LOTTA GODS"--The planes sure seem crowded...

[Omegonthesane]

Speaking for myself, in a game system that is balanced around parties having a level appropriate cleric, I find "able to revoke the cleric's cleric privileges from on high at their personal discretion" to be a distasteful ability for gods to have.

That, and due to Christian hegemony, some players are going to get it in their heads that being able to be stabbed by mortals constitutes not being a "real" god.

as for "you have to explain why goblins still exist when there is a 10th level cleric" most people intuitively grasp that a mid level adventurer with sharply defined limits on their actions has shit to do and cannot reasonably be expected to have time or spell slots to spare on low level problems. Gods are generally not conceptualised as having such limits.

[deaddmwalking]

They're hardly "indistinguishable," what with the spell-granting and the church-having and so forth. It's entirely possible to keep all of the mechanical and flavor aspects of actual gods in the setting while reducing their power level to the original "can be killed by a particularly motivated 15th-level fighter" baseline to avoid DM dickery, there's no need to replace them all with Goa'uld-style imposters.

What 'mechanical aspects'? Granting spells? Wizards get spells and don't worship a deity. Bards get arcane versions of healing spells so it isn't granting access to CLW that makes someone a deity. In the real world, it is impossible that every mainstream religion is correct, so it's also totally possible to have 'church having' if you either posit that gods don't exist and/or that if they do it is no more provable than in the real world.

I've never really understood the "actual demons and dragons and stuff in my game are fine, but let's make the gods not be actual gods" thing; it reminds me too much of the "Nobody but Yahweh is a real god!" Christian rhetoric that I was surrounded by growing up and that convinced my folks that D&D was Satanic for depicting "false gods." Let settings have actual gods, and then go stab them in the face because lots of gods deserve face-stabbing, I don't see what the problem is.

In a book like American Gods, it's probably worth questioning whether they deserve the moniker 'gods' and clear they don't deserve a capital g 'God'. Dragons and Demons are fine in my game; they are already as powerful as many of the creatures listed as deities. Since people just worship 'pretty streams' and 'big trees', you don't have to create ultra-powerful beings to justify any of the behaviors you want.

Clerics are wizards that BELIEVE they're divinely inspired. And you can totally have Paladins that worship something that's SUPPOSED to be a false-god, but good luck convincing anyone that Dianetics is all a farce when they have 'divine casters' claiming that their powers prove it is real.

[JonSetanta]

Personally, I absolutely HATE the division between Divine and Arcane on a mechanical and thematic basis.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Personally, I absolutely HATE the division between Divine and Arcane on a mechanical and thematic basis.

Why?

[Foxwarrior]

If gods do something that isn't just "be overpowered"... I could really do with a Tome God race to play, I'm running out of weird races I wrote ten years ago.

[JonSetanta]

If gods do something that isn't just "be overpowered"... I could really do with a Tome God race to play, I'm running out of weird races I wrote ten years ago.

"Godling"
Divine Rank -20

Personally, I absolutely HATE the division between Divine and Arcane on a mechanical and thematic basis.

Why?

After playing so many other games, which includes non-D&D RPGs, Vidya, Magic, and even Dungeon Crawl, it seems like D&D is the ONLY one that has every Arcane non-Bard caster as a slight variation of Tolkein Wizard.

Why can't they cast spells in armor? Uhhhh Gandalf and Saruman wore robes, that's why.

But in Magic I can put a Prodigal Sorcerer on the table and slap Darksteel Plate on it.
In Dungeon Crawl I can start as a Warrior, buy or find a spell book, and level up my blastan magics.
In every freakin Final Fantasy the division between "healer" and "blaster" is even arbitrary in most of them, given the Red Mage, or even Tactics dual classing white/black together as some kind of ultimate mage limited only by the action economy.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

You're going to have to elaborate on the part where there's a divide between Divine and Arcane magic. I remembered the Warmage off the top of my head, and they can cast magic in medium armor just fine. They don't even prepare spells. Burn a feat and you're casting in heavy armor.

[Prak]

Even in a D&D setting, deities are indistinguishable from other powerful outsiders. Just demoting them from 'god' to 'Titan' and let them claim a mantle and enslave a world (a la Star Gate SG-1) and you get everything you need form deities and nothing you don't.

They're hardly "indistinguishable," what with the spell-granting and the church-having and so forth. It's entirely possible to keep all of the mechanical and flavor aspects of actual gods in the setting while reducing their power level to the original "can be killed by a particularly motivated 15th-level fighter" baseline to avoid DM dickery, there's no need to replace them all with Goa'uld-style imposters.

I've never really understood the "actual demons and dragons and stuff in my game are fine, but let's make the gods not be actual gods" thing; it reminds me too much of the "Nobody but Yahweh is a real god!" Christian rhetoric that I was surrounded by growing up and that convinced my folks that D&D was Satanic for depicting "false gods." Let settings have actual gods, and then go stab them in the face because lots of gods deserve face-stabbing, I don't see what the problem is.

I mean, in fairness, if you look at polytheistic mythology, a lot of gods are just, sort of, nebulously powerful, rather than specifically omnipotent. Like... no one, in mythology, goes up to Olympus to stab Zeus in the face, but he's not so powerful that you couldn't really imagine someone doing it. Sure, they need to be able to withstand a lightning bolt up the ass, but is that really that different than "if you want to take on Medusa, you need to be able to resist or avoid getting petrified?"

Gods actually die in myth quite often, it just usually involves another god, and maybe some trickery, but even then, in Greek myth there was a creature, the ophiotaurus, whose entrails are said to grant the ability to defeat the gods to whoever burned them. Ie, special magic.

So I don't think it's really wrong to have facestabbable gods in games. Omnipotent, unkillable gods tend, in my understanding, to be the province of mono/henotheism.

[Foxwarrior]

I believe Greek gods have Wolverine-style immortality... You can't kill them with normal weapons but you totally can stab them in the face to make it easier to tie them up.

[JonSetanta]

If a deity has HP, it can die.

[Foxwarrior]

What if it has HP but is immune to the Dead status effect

[Omegonthesane]

see also: what you'd have to do to keep a troll down forever if you had no access to fire

[Dogbert]

I only differ in believing that it is possible for entities with divine ranks to learn to be better.

That only proves you're not the target demographic (it also proves you're good, and that I'd probably enjoy playing at your table).

[Prak]

it also proves you're good, and that I'd probably enjoy playing at your table

Hey now, let's not say anything we can't take back

[JonSetanta]

What if it has HP but is immune to the Dead status effect

In the UQ Holder comic, there are dozens of methods for pinning down, impaling, wrapping, eating, banishing, or just plain sending an immortal into a star or black hole.

But then again, if a deity has a spirit or whatever that just changes planes, you have to chase them down.

[Wiseman]

If gods do something that isn't just "be overpowered"... I could really do with a Tome God race to play, I'm running out of weird races I wrote ten years ago.

Here you go: http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic= ... #msg107499

[Emerald]

Speaking for myself, in a game system that is balanced around parties having a level appropriate cleric, I find "able to revoke the cleric's cleric privileges from on high at their personal discretion" to be a distasteful ability for gods to have.

It's the "personal discretion" part that's the issue, I think, not the ability to do it at all. The cleric class says it takes a "gross violation" of their patron's code of conduct to lose their powers, and that's not the kind of thing that should happen arbitrarily on the part of the god(/DM) or accidentally on the part of the cleric(/player).

The fact that clerics, druids, and paladins all draw power from an external entity and all have codes of conduct that could theoretically lead to their magic getting shut off at any time, yet one hears about dickish DMs trying to make paladins fall all the time, trying to make clerics fall every once in a while, and trying to make druids fall basically never, implies to me that the problem is something to be addressed on the DM end of the scale.

That, and due to Christian hegemony, some players are going to get it in their heads that being able to be stabbed by mortals constitutes not being a "real" god.

as for "you have to explain why goblins still exist when there is a 10th level cleric" most people intuitively grasp that a mid level adventurer with sharply defined limits on their actions has shit to do and cannot reasonably be expected to have time or spell slots to spare on low level problems. Gods are generally not conceptualised as having such limits.

In a book like American Gods, it's probably worth questioning whether they deserve the moniker 'gods' and clear they don't deserve a capital g 'God'. Dragons and Demons are fine in my game; they are already as powerful as many of the creatures listed as deities. Since people just worship 'pretty streams' and 'big trees', you don't have to create ultra-powerful beings to justify any of the behaviors you want.

Well...

I mean, in fairness, if you look at polytheistic mythology, a lot of gods are just, sort of, nebulously powerful, rather than specifically omnipotent. Like... no one, in mythology, goes up to Olympus to stab Zeus in the face, but he's not so powerful that you couldn't really imagine someone doing it.
[...]
So I don't think it's really wrong to have facestabbable gods in games. Omnipotent, unkillable gods tend, in my understanding, to be the province of mono/henotheism.

What Prak said.

When one starts talking about "what gods are conceptualized as" and "deserving the moniker of gods" and such, it's as though people view it as a choice between a capital-G God that's transcendent and omniscient and personally invested in every single worshiper and such on the one hand, and a Goa'uld who's just like any other powerful outsider except people somehow think it's extra-special for some reason on the other hand, completely forgetting that no official setting has ever had any capital-G gods that clerics actually worship (overdeities being their own distinct thing) and that polytheistic religions like the ones in D&D (and like the ones the real-world monotheisms grew out of) generally have gods that sit somewhere in the middle, being both demonstrably distinct from and more powerful than other supernatural beings like a God yet also fallible and busy with other stuff besides constantly helping mortals and such like a Goa'uld.

Ares, Thor, and Kord are all smarter/faster/stronger/etc. than any mortal warrior, can get around the multiverse pretty easily, can personally kick the butt of any non-divine outsider you care to name, and so forth, but they can be tricked by mortals, defeated by other gods, wounded or killed by Titans/Jotnar/Archdevils, and so on. No one gets up in Ares's business about the Problem of Evil when he doesn't personally intervene in all Greek battles or personally killsteal Herakles, so why is having Kord-the-actual-god in the setting such a problem that going with either unknowable gods or not-actually-gods is a better option?

What 'mechanical aspects'? Granting spells? Wizards get spells and don't worship a deity. Bards get arcane versions of healing spells so it isn't granting access to CLW that makes someone a deity.

I wasn't talking about the class features for divine casters, rather the actual deity mechanics. Stuff like gods being able to sense everything around their holy sites or involving their worshipers or portfolios, being able to shape Outer Planes in general and their divine realms in particular, being able to spam all of their domain spells, and the various Salient Divine Abilities. Essentially, the kinds of things that you'd want to give your generic outsider-that's-not-an-actual-god anyway if you wanted to justify them hearing prayers, controlling an afterlife realm, being better at [portfolio thing] than anyone else, and so on.

In the real world, it is impossible that every mainstream religion is correct, so it's also totally possible to have 'church having' if you either posit that gods don't exist and/or that if they do it is no more provable than in the real world.

In the real world, no one gets divine spellcasting. People belong to various real-world religions because they think their gods are better/more moral/more real/etc. than the others, but who would belong to the church of Joe the Sun God and go through all the worshiping and rituals and all that if members of the church of Dave the Angel Who Happens To Be Particularly Glowy (who's happy to help you learn divine casting so long as you're a nice person, without claiming to be a god himself) and Bob's Academy of Godless Archivism (who teaches divine magic as a skill or profession, with no worship or prayers involved at all) could all access the exact same magic and ended up in exactly the same afterlives and such?

In a world where powerful people can plane shift to the afterlife to help decide which one they want to aim for and contact other plane a bunch of powerful outsiders of all stripes, it doesn't make much sense that people would arbitrarily have started churches of certain beings they called "gods" and didn't start churches of other beings they called "not gods" unless there was some observable distinction between them.

Now, if when one says "make the gods unknowable" one also intends to remove all the planehopping and divinations and such to preserve the mystery against everyone in the setting, not just church-going commoners, then that could potentially work, but that's a lot more extensive a change than just declaring that no one knows if the gods are real and leaving everything else alone.

[Prak]

Now, if when one says "make the gods unknowable" one also intends to remove all the planehopping and divinations and such to preserve the mystery against everyone in the setting, not just church-going commoners, then that could potentially work, but that's a lot more extensive a change than just declaring that no one knows if the gods are real and leaving everything else alone.

I vaguely remember saying something like this earlier in the thread, but I don't think you, necessarily, need to remove all plane hopping et all to have unknowable gods. If your level 20 cleric shows up to Pelor's Golden Palace, there's no reason for Pelor to let him in, and if he does, there's no reason Pelor has to answer any of his questions honestly, or at all. I suppose there's the expectation that a LG (or whatever Pelor's specific alignment is) would answer honestly, but... Well, who's gonna tell Pelor he has to? Who's going to put Pelor in a zone of truth? Gods, generally, are supposed/expected to be something like the definitions of alignments (whether this makes any sense or not), so Pelor can just say "it's not lying if a god does it to a mortal," and who could really give him shit about it?

[deaddmwalking]

The planes are bigger than the gods. There's plenty of cool non-material worlds that a PC can potentially adventure in, whether there are 'worshipped on the material plane gods' or not.

I think making all the gods 'like Zeus' doesn't marginalize 'the big three', but it does marginalize Shintoism and Indian villages that worship a living child as a living god.

Defining what gods are real also means defining what religions are real. I think the play space is bigger when you don't do that.

[Dogbert]

It's the "personal discretion" part that's the issue, I think, not the ability to do it at all.

Ever since 2E Clerics have been a reasonably OP class to motivate players (since no one wants to be the healbot), but that power comes with strings. A cleric's powers comes explicitly at their deity's say-so and... who happens to play the deities? Clerics exist specifically so the GM has even more leverage to impose his will on the players. Either players do as Mister Cavern says, or they get no heals.

Granted, nowadays half Wizard spells blatantly say in the text "this spell is subject to not work if the DM doesn't feel like it," but with clerics that has always been the default, even built in the cosmogony.

[JonSetanta]

Give Abjuration some heals and if it's too much to port over from the Cleric list, bump the spells up a level or whatever.

Or maybe I'm just pushing the atheist White Mage trope too often, since Clerics are probably the dumbest development out of AD&D besides Exceptional Strength rolls and the goddamn Monks.

[Foxwarrior]

If gods do something that isn't just "be overpowered"... I could really do with a Tome God race to play, I'm running out of weird races I wrote ten years ago.

Here you go: http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic= ... #msg107499

Well, a version of the d20srd god rules that's been nerfed to be playable as a level 1 Tome character... and also has Touhou initiator powers... is not necessarily what I had in mind, but I guess my end result feels a lot like an anime god: https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=2542717

[Emerald]

I vaguely remember saying something like this earlier in the thread, but I don't think you, necessarily, need to remove all plane hopping et all to have unknowable gods. If your level 20 cleric shows up to Pelor's Golden Palace, there's no reason for Pelor to let him in, and if he does, there's no reason Pelor has to answer any of his questions honestly, or at all. I suppose there's the expectation that a LG (or whatever Pelor's specific alignment is) would answer honestly, but... Well, who's gonna tell Pelor he has to? Who's going to put Pelor in a zone of truth? Gods, generally, are supposed/expected to be something like the definitions of alignments (whether this makes any sense or not), so Pelor can just say "it's not lying if a god does it to a mortal," and who could really give him shit about it?

It's not the idea that PCs can plane shift to Elysium, barge into Pelor's living room, and ask him a bunch of questions that makes it hard to make Pelor "unknowable," it's that Pelor has a Golden Palace at all and can keep out any mortals he wants (where any random guardinal or high-level retired NG adventurer can't do the same), and contact other plane and commune let you pose questions to him directly with defined chances of right/wrong/lying answers, and clerics of Pelor who cast planar ally demonstrably get different critters than clerics of any other NG god or of the abstract concept of Goodness, and so on.

Even Eberron, which goes out of its way to keep religions more vague and has several relatively-nontheistic religions as well, only gets away with "Well, maaaybe the Sovereigns aren't actually real?" because clerics capable of casting plane shift and commune and such are fairly rare (as most named NPCs top out at 12th level or so and basically none of them are clerics capable of casting 5th-level spells) and none of the books detail the planes at all, essentially just ducking the question and forcing a DM wanting to run a high-level game there to make up their own answer like they do with the Mourning.

I'm not saying it's impossible or even particularly difficult to make unknowable gods work in a given setting, just that there are a bunch of mechanical and setting knock-on effects that have to be taken into consideration, it's not just as easy as saying "No one knows for sure" and leaving it at that.

I think making all the gods 'like Zeus' doesn't marginalize 'the big three', but it does marginalize Shintoism and Indian villages that worship a living child as a living god.

Defining what gods are real also means defining what religions are real. I think the play space is bigger when you don't do that.

On the one hand, I don't think defining things really narrows the playspace in a significant way. The implicit 3e D&D setting already supports polytheism and animism side-by-side, because the Spirit Shaman is a thing, there are spirit-related spells, the Genius Loci and Spirit of the Land monsters and a whole bunch of fey work nicely as place spirits, and so forth, and a child could easily be a "living god" if a god invested them as a proxy (giving them 1 divine rank and thus demigod powers) or a bunch of clerics-of-a-cause devoted to Family or Community or similar treated him or her as an intercessor while actually drawing power from elsewhere (like how in Greyhawk the followers of Yeenoghu actually draw power from Erythnul) or the like.

On the other hand, it may indeed narrow the playspace, but literally any major decision on religion does that. Deciding that the Norse gods are the only ones that actually exist means deciding that the Egyptian gods don't actually exist and vice versa, deciding that there are infinite kami in all things means you can't have a dualistic Good-god-vs.-Evil-god-with-no-other-divine-beings setup and vice versa, and so on. And I think a decision that leads to gods being actual creatures whose divine realms one can adventure in and who can be stabbed in the face provides more adventure opportunities and is better for the game overall than one that leads to gods being non-persons and leaving only their religions as things that can be interacted with.

Ever since 2E Clerics have been a reasonably OP class to motivate players (since no one wants to be the healbot), but that power comes with strings. A cleric's powers comes explicitly at their deity's say-so and... who happens to play the deities? Clerics exist specifically so the GM has even more leverage to impose his will on the players. Either players do as Mister Cavern says, or they get no heals.

No arguments here that divine casters are much more subject to DM interference than other classes, but there's a big difference between "the bargain between deity and cleric is that so long as the cleric serves the deity's interest the cleric gets to keep his powers" (what's implied by the various Codes of Conduct in 3e and the flavor text in both 2e and 3e) and "gods are capricious jerks who can take away even a completely loyal cleric's powers whenever they feel like it" (the way it might work under a dickish DM). The former means someone who consistently roleplays their cleric according to the god and religion chosen should have nothing to worry about and falling is something that both player and DM should see coming; the latter means picking cleric is a crapshoot, but in a way that's the fault of the DM, not the cleric class.

It's like dead and wild magic zones. If you're playing in the Forgotten Realms, dead and wild magic zones are a thing that exist, but the existing ones are pretty well known, you can ask around to find out about any new ones, and if you're playing a caster they're not really something you need to worry about most times in most campaigns. If your FR game suddenly has your party running into dead magic zones on every adventure (without some sort of foreshadowed plot development explaining such), you don't blame FR for making dead magic zones a thing, you blame the DM for obviously trying to screw over the casters in the party and you give advice to the DM on why not to do that and what other things can be done to challenge casters instead.

Maybe I'm just biased on this particular argument because I've never had DMs who made any divine casters fall arbitrarily in any games I've played in. The only times it's happened have been once when a cleric PC was being roleplayed in obvious conflict with his god's tenets, and the DM warned him it was a possibility and they worked out a way for him to switch religions in-character to fit the PC better, and once when a player wanted to be a cleric of a particular god but that god was scheduled to be killed off and then later replaced by another during the campaign, so the DM filled him in ahead of time and the player was okay with roleplaying a crisis-of-faith situation for a while until things sorted themselves out. So to me, all of these intentionally-dickish DMs are really more of an edge case than anything to be overly worried about in practice.

[JonSetanta]

So to me, all of these intentionally-dickish DMs are really more of an edge case than anything to be overly worried about in practice.

Don't know if you blocked me or not, but figured I'd throw in a perception on the matter.

Roughly half of all DMs I've played with have been this "edge case". Maybe it's the region I'm in, maybe it's just because these DMs are the ones lacking players for their group FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, but the old TGD Trope comes to mind; No Gaming Is Better Than Bad Gaming.

[nockermensch]

As an Atheist (tips Fedora) I don't like actual gods in my games.

In my campaigns/world-building, the multiverse is simply too big for actual creator gods. Life, the sentient species and everything else came into being through mechanical processes, that are somewhat more colorful than the ones we get here, because D&D Physics includes things like other planes, aligments and actual fucking magic.

Now, people inside the multiverse believe in all sorts of things, and in places filled with magic, belief has substance. More pratically, borrowing from RL occultists, what happens is that ideas manifest in the astral plane as "thought constructs", which are usually of a feeble and temporary nature (incidentally explaining in-universe how Detect Thoughts work). But if a large group of people focuses long and hard enough on an idea, you end up with something big, strong and durable, called egregores. Gods, as I write them, are a common kind of egregore.

These gods are not beings. They don't have a body to be killed - the egregore can't be harmed or destroyed directly - or initiative. They're more like computer programs running on the astral plane, reactive to prayers and events determined by their mythos. In game terms, I like to use the only bit of actual god-like behavior assigned to deities in the D&D Joke Books: That the gods are linked to Domains and just know facts and events related to these, sometimes months in advance. In my games, gods relay this information through dreams and omens.

In some rare conditions a pre-existing being can become the avatar of a god. This creates somebody with a personality that's a mix from the being's own personality and how the god behaves in canon. If the personalities clash, the being risks being overwhelmed by the egregore and forced to roleplay as the god. It's usually understood that avatars are not the gods themselves, but there's a lot of deception and assorted fuckery going on. For example, some faiths have avatars created from babies, that then grow up being told that they're the living god, their natural personality all but supressed.

The outer planes are into this scheme, too. Not only powerful elementals and outsiders (who are beings that arise fully formed from their planes) lend their beliefs to several gods, but sometimes they make extremely durable and powerful avatars. So, if you go to Celestia to question Pelor, you may actually find somebody there answering by that name. But whatever answers he has will be limited by Pelor's domains or what the avatar personally knows. The avatar can have plans, and to some extent, bend the god's doctrine. Since the avatar's actions are usually recorded on the Scriptures and these inform the believers that actually power-up the god via their prayers and rituals, it's possible for gods to evolve through History. To destroy a god, you need to make people stop doing the prayers and rituals that keep the egregore going on. Doing this seriously enough to be a threat to a god's existence is usually enough for an avatar to manifest and hunt the threat down. So god killing it's not easy but's doable, and it involves boss fights.

Regarding the origins of divine magic, I use a place deep into the astral plane called "The Source". The Source is a repository of spells, both arcane and divine. It's the in-universe explanation for why the fuck casters from all around the multi-verse have access to the same set of common spells. Sorcerers gain glimpses of spells from The Source, and divine casters gain access to large sets of spells (and domains powers) from the same place. With divine casters, this access is usually gained through mystical experiences where they see their gods, but as philosophers (divine casters without a god) can tell, you can simply follow a school of thought and learn how to Bless and cure wounds.